Solange is Elle’s March 2017 cover star and the shoot does not disappoint. She looks amazing in a full-red look (coat by Norma Kamali, pants by Pleats Please Issey Miyake) and the photos, by Terry Tsiolis, are all very Solange — lots of sculptural, monochromatic looks and striking red eye makeup.

The magazine has released snippets of the cover profile, written by Salamisha Tillet, who calls A Seat at the Table  “sweeping in its reckoning with the nation's vexed racial past and present, yet intimate and unexpectedly gentle." The bits of the interview currently online show Solange reflecting on childhood with Beyoncé and Kelly Rowland, raising her son as a teen in Idaho and the creation of her epic album.

"I did want to create this juxtaposition, politically, of having these very hard, messy conversations but having them stylistically in a way that you can really hear me, and not the yelling, the rage," she said of Seat. "I wanted to project in my delivery what I was not achieving at all: peace and having a certain lightness and airiness that could maybe help me get closer to having more light and airiness in my life."

Solange started writing music as a kid. "My sister and Kelly [Rowland] were the same age, which is like a built-in best friend in the house; they were extremely close," she said. "Writing felt like this insular thing that I could go back in my room and express all that I would observe, all the emotions that would arise. It felt like mine, my little thing."

She also talks about a little-publicized time in her life, when she lived with her son Julez in the small town of Moscow, Idaho. "It was one of the most bittersweet moments of my life," said Solange, "because I was so in love with Julez, and having spent a lot of time on the road, I yearned to be in one place, to have the opportunity to really ground myself with him. But it was isolating and lonely, and so cold and dark. And it was just Julez and me most of the time. It was hard to imagine being able to progress in my career in any way."

Pick up the issue for more.